She’s a new kind of influencer — sharing real pictures of herself alongside the ‘perfect’ shots that usually get posted.
Danae Mercer speaks three languages, won a scholarship to Cambridge, studied for a degree in journalism and politics and became editor-in-chief of a glossy magazine at the age of 30. She also has cellulite.
I’m not the one making a thing of it — she is. Of Mercer’s many accomplishments it is the dimples in her derriere that have earned her more than two million followers on Instagram and a level of celebrity that means she is regularly stopped in London, New York and on the street in her home city of Florence, Italy.
“I’ve had cellulite since I was 13,” she tells me. “I am genetically lanky, but I’ve always had hips and thighs. I used to be so embarrassed and ashamed of it. Now I am trying to be who I needed back then.”
Mercer, 37, is one of a growing tribe of self-love and body positivity influencers who describe themselves as “posting, not posing” on social media. Her feed is full of side-by-side shots that first show her, and often her bottom, carefully angled, deliberately lit, sometimes digitally doctored — and then what the same shot looks like without the “help”.
“8am” reads the blurb on one snap of her Insta-catnip peach-like bum and waspy waist in profile, ribcage visible. Alongside it is the same torso, same leggings, now revealing a rounded stomach and the caption “8.05am and one bite of food”.
In another post Mercer films herself in a bikini, yanking its knicker line high up over her hipbones to form a flattering V-shape, then sucking in her stomach, pivoting forwards and popping out a haunch, so that the camera no longer picks up her “hip dips”. (Despite this newly jaunty Gen Z name for what the rest of us used to call “saddlebags”, there remains widespread consternation about actually owning a pair.)
“How you angle your body can transform it dramatically,” Mercer says. “If I stand in a certain way, I look like I have really tight abs and supertoned legs. But 99 per cent of the time my body doesn’t look like that.”
Of course, even during that 99 per cent of the time Mercer’s body nevertheless qualifies as the near-archetypal template for not just ordinary but absolutely banging. At 5ft 8in and with gym-honed 34-29-38.5 measurements, despite having given birth to a daughter last year, and with the help of the occasional lip filler and Botox, she is not exactly breaking the mould of what has for the past century been deemed conventionally attractive and what social media now so ruthlessly markets to the masses as aspirational.
You could dismiss Mercer as Margot Robbie’s Barbie, waking to the existential horror of the world via orange-peel thighs — or you could see her as an algorithm-friendly double agent, feeding back from behind influencer lines on the new guerrilla warfare being used in the battle of body image. Because we were once told that the camera never lies, but these days it does little else.
“Photorealism is dead,” says Julian Chokattu, reviews editor at Wired. “Smoothing skin, lightening, editing and erasing people from the background — you see it in travel shots on social media too, where they’ve been embellished, then people go there and say, ‘This isn’t what it looked like.’
“These tools have existed for a long time, but they’re now drastically more accessible for everyone. The settings shouldn’t be default — you should be able to turn them off. But we need to get into people’s heads that the things you see on social media are almost exclusively going to have been touched up.”
Filters, Photoshop, Facetune and Autoenhance… it used to be only celebrities who were smoothed and sculpted by the retoucher’s brush, pixels analysed and pores perfected. Now anybody can do so on a screen in the palm of their hand, and it isn’t somebody else’s features they are scrutinising, endlessly redrawing them or removing flaws — it is their own.
“I have a Roman nose,” Mercer says, pointing to a tiny, almost invisible ridge. “Not an influencer nose. The first thing most filters do is shrink it down.”
The best models always know their angles, yet what was once a professional-level intimacy with one’s appearance and God-given facial topography has become a civilian prerequisite too. Not only is there a high-definition camera in every coat pocket and handbag, in every supermarket queue and back row of the bus — many of us are more likely to be found wielding them at ourselves rather than others. Ours is the first society to be constantly captured and seen on screens; the first to be able to commit our features (or the version of them that we most like) not only to memory but also to the internet, in perpetuity.
“Women already had an internal picture of what they needed to project,” says Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue and Bodies. “But it is now even more exaggerated — we’ve become the person we encounter in the mirror. It’s living as the object one is looking at, rather than from the perspective of a moving, breathing, animated body.”
“I’ve noticed this in two particular populations: people in their early twenties, and people on the other side of it who are struggling to make peace with ageing,” the psychotherapist and counsellor Lucy Clyde tells me.
“At a friend’s recent 40th, every conversation I had with the women there eventually turned not to work, as it used to, but to “work”: Botox, injectables and lip fillers. Who had done it, who wanted to, who felt angry at the expectation they should (only me that last one; I’m actually a lot of fun at parties). In purely anecdotal evidence from a very small group, I noticed mothers of girls felt more conflicted than those with boys. (The idea of explaining Botox to my daughter, who is so far untroubled by this stuff, has always been a key prophylactic for me.)
Beyond the party, it seems most women my age have had it: some loud and proud; some who don’t want their husbands to know; some who came as a genuine shock — serious wildcards. “But you’re a primary school teacher!” I almost said to one.
I am out of step with the mainstream on this. At 38 I reference the beauty writer Jessica DeFino’s line about what feels like 100 times a week in my head: “Botox superficially eases age anxiety for the user but compounds the issue for the collective.” The “issue” being that women are now expected not to visibly age. On crinkly, dehydrated days, when my reflection stares back older, it is somehow soothing to know there is the option. I know I don’t really ever want to mess with my face, but when I spend too long on my phone it seems somehow inevitable that I will.
There is now a gap between how we know we can look on a screen and what we see in our reflections, a disconnect that works on our brains in much the same way as dysmorphia. Body dysmorphic disorder convinces sufferers they are so ugly or disfigured that appearance becomes a debilitating obsession; it is now more prevalent in the US than anorexia or bulimia.
Is it any surprise then that we have reached peak tweak in recent years? Between 2017 and 2021, use of facial fillers grew by 60 per cent to 5.27 million treatments globally. In the US, according to the Aesthetic Society, chin augmentation procedures increased by almost a third between 2020 and 2021, with facial liposuction up 99 per cent in the same period. In the UK, the number of cosmetic surgery procedures rose by 102 per cent in 2022 — a figure that doesn’t include Botox, fillers or other injections.
The uptick has been mainly among young people. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery states that 75 per cent of plastic surgeons reported a surge in patients below the age of 30 as reality TV shows and TikTokers broadcasting while still in bandages have made procedures such as Botox and other injectables a status symbol as well as a fashion statement. Where once cosmetic surgery was seen as an anti-ageing solution, it has become a means of changing one’s looks, moulding unique faces to modish trends.
“My work has changed drastically in the past few years,” explains Dr Angelica Kavouni, a cosmetic surgeon based on Harley Street since 2005. “We never used to treat people in their twenties or early thirties at all. Now we have patients coming very distraught, with some very weird representations of what they feel is normal or attractive.”
Younger patients are requesting buccal fat removal from their cheeks to make them look hollow, plus fillers above to emphasise the cheekbones, or mandible augmentation — adding filler to the corner of the jawbone, below the ear, to make it more angular. The aim is to give what TikTok calls a “snatched” (very sharp) jawline, in the style of Ariana Grande or Bella Hadid. None of this, Kavouni says, is naturally occurring physiognomy in women.
“It’s almost like anime cartoons, like creating a pixie. They come and say, ‘I’ve simulated this and that’s how I would like to look.’ The perception of the self has become so distorted, I don’t know whether we can go back.”
“I don’t shame women who choose to do cosmetic treatments,” Mercer says, “but I do worry about teenagers doing them. Would I have had a nose job at 19 if I’d been seeing that? I got a bad Chinese tattoo when I was 19 and I regret that.”
“It is incredibly harmful,” Susie Orbach agrees. “It might seem empowering to feel you have the right cheekbones, but it’s often the first of many, many procedures — and then the preoccupation of maintaining them is problematic.”
In 2018 the cosmetic doctor Tijion Esho coined the phrase “Snapchat dysmorphia” to describe the phenomenon of screen-fed reflection disappointment. The social media platform is known for pioneering face-filter technology to produce everything from grinning broccoli-floret selfies to gender-swapped faces and amped-up, Kardashian-style features with full lips and brows and thick lashes.
Make-up brands such as MAC and Estée Lauder partner with Snapchat so users can try new products — lipsticks, blusher — via its augmented reality lenses. The platform also happens to be where most adolescents hang out virtually. Snapchat is WhatsApp for teens, the digital-era synthesis of the hours I spent staring at myself in our hallway mirror while hogging the landline between 1996 and 2002.
Sara Puhto, 27, is another body-acceptance blogger, based in Finland and posting under the name @saggysara on Instagram to about 430,000 followers.
“I used to constantly use beauty filters on Snapchat and compare my unedited, unfiltered face with the images,” she tells me while on holiday in Thailand posting breathe-out bikini shots. “I’d wish I had a smaller nose or bigger lips, and that made me contemplate getting cosmetic surgery. I find myself looking at my face all the time, hyperanalysing it constantly.”
“A lot of patients use so many products — high-concentration vitamin C, retinol — all layered up to get that smooth, filter-texture appearance,” Kavouni says, “that they end up with dermatitis.”
When I take the phrase “Snapchat dysmorphia” to the company, there is no comment — this is neither a phrase that has come up nor an issue it has heard of, it explains. It says that the most popular filters are usually the silliest: the Disgust Lens, which makes the user look grossed out, and the Crying Lens (as you might expect) were used billions of times during the first 72 hours of going live. At TikTok there is no comment either, but I am assured that its community guidelines state that should a user search “anorexia” or similar, “We provide in-app tips on how to identify negative self-talk.”
“The tech companies are doing the bare minimum,” Mercer says, flagging Meta’s own 2021 research that found Instagram was bad for teen mental health — and which it then suppressed. “I don’t think TikTok feels any pressure at all. But I have parents coming to me saying, ‘How can I save my daughter?’ "
She highlights another TikTok trend for what she calls “hyper-unposed casual”, whereby influencers will start videos by placing their phones haphazardly or applying lipgloss so that the ensuing content seems unplanned — and all the more convincing. She wants us to recognise what is going on in the images we are fed.
Mercer knows her angles. She knows the difference between taking pictures in soft morning light — the reason many fashion photographers insist on call times of 5am for beachy swimwear shoots — and the harsh midday sun. A post of hers demonstrating how many before/after diet pics are faked with light, filters, ill-fitting clothing and bad posture has racked up 41,000 likes. The images have since, she says, been “nicked by dodgy companies” who use them to market fraudulent products; the “after” version is more likely to be regurgitated by the algorithm too.
“The more traditionally beautiful, the more perfectly posed, is going to get the attention. People watch longer; they watch more. Maybe they feel worse about themselves, so they keep scrolling.”
Mercer started out showing, as most influencers do, a highly curated version of her life on Instagram. As editor-in-chief of Women’s Health Middle East, then a freelance health and travel journalist, hers was a feed of sunshine, luxury hotels, exercise and wellness.
“I started to think about what I was sharing online,” she tells me. “A very posed body, very perfected images. I looked so graceful, but I’m quite a clumsy, hectic person. I’d reached a point where I didn’t really feel like me.”
Then, shortly before Covid hit, she began sharing her “outtakes” instead and during lockdown swiftly went viral several times over, at times adding more than 100,000 followers a day.
“I had women messaging saying, ‘My body looks like this too.’ That mattered to me because I grew up in the Nineties, when big butts were a punchline.”
Danae Mercer was born in California to a single mother and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.
“My mom was a very young mom,” she says. “We never talked about body image; she never knew [how] to have that conversation. She didn’t really have those words.”
When her mother died, Mercer — then 19 and at the local Creighton University — developed a series of eating disorders so severe she almost forfeited her scholarship.
“That was what saved me. I couldn’t lose my chance.”
Mercer went on to secure more funding, this time for Cambridge, on a placement for writers who were the first in their family to reach higher education. When, on our cover shoot, I ask her husband, an Italian property investor, if he minds his wife posing in a thong, he says not, “because she does it all with brains”.
I wonder whether Mercer feels she is providing a public service on social media.
“The bad guys want me to shut up and be pretty,” she says. “There are times when I feel very confident and times when I feel very vulnerable. But if I [gave up], I’d be letting them win.”
How does she balance the honesty with her income as an influencer? Mercer tells me about offers from big brands she has turned down because they haven’t aligned with her values. One was £20,000 ($40,620) for a single grid post in which she would feature a new “holistic lifestyle device”.
“It was a weighing scale!” she hoots. “And by the way, they don’t usually offer that high.”
Written by: Harriet Walker
© The Times of London